~ Standing up for Public Education

Monthly Archives: July 2013

THE GAINESVILLE SUN/ July 19, 2013.

Florida’s school grades are not statistically valid. They’re not true. They are not measuring what is “real.”

Folks across the state dialed into this week’s Board of Education meeting to hear those troubling words for themselves. It seems that Florida’s motive for arbitrarily moving the bar was sticking districts with 242 new “F” schools. Commissioner Tony Bennett proposed a “safety net” to prevent any school from falling more than one letter grade which passed by a 4 to 3 vote, sparing 154 schools and leaving 108 on the table.

For 15 years, Florida politicians sold the “A” to “F” school grading system as the education reform gold standard for the nation. A whole expensive, un-piloted system was built on viewing our neighborhood schools filled with our sweet children as “As” or “Fs.”

School grades are the single high stakes arbiter of property values, teacher pay, school funding and quality. Dozens of states across the nation have been lobbied heavily to adopt “A” to “F” school grading system as part of their “reform agenda.”

As parents, we teach our children empathy for others and the importance of fair play. How do tell our children that although their grades are improving, their school is an “F?” How do we explain that a school grade is not true, but arbitrary?

It was deeply disappointing to hear Board of Education members insist that it would be better to let 25 F schools balloon to 262 “F” schools because those students need the “truth.” Where’s the truth in a statistically invalid system? How do we find “truth” with zero transparency? Will there ever be any truth when we need task forces and annual emergency meetings to flip the facts? Our children deserve so much better than this.

We could start by looking at the fact that the 800 point scale used to calculate school grades allows the loss of 80 points to drop an “A” school to a “C” or a “C” school to an “F.” If a child gets 10% of the answers wrong on a test, it doesn’t cost him three letter grades. This arbitrary scale was set by the Board of Education years ago and the board has the power to alter it at will.

Our governor-appointed Board of Education routinely uses its considerable power to shape outcomes. Who can forget the FCAT Writes disaster where student scores went from 1s to 5s in one phone call? Then there was the No Child Left Behind waiver crisis last summer that threatened to throw hundreds of schools into “F “status because of Florida’s choice to record ESE and ELL test scores in a punitive way. The solution to that self-induced drama was the first “safety net.”

The sad part is that teachers and school leaders have warned politicians, the BOE and profit-driven policy influencers for years that Florida’s “A” to “F” accountability system is a house of cards. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, politicians stick to the script, rigidly intent on hawking Florida’s “good news.” Such blind faith exposes the lie. Florida’s “A” to “F” school grading system cannot be a model of success on one hand while seeking to rapidly grow the number of “F” schools on the other.

Manufactured crisis is exhausting. Commissioner Bennett wisely proposed a solution to reduce the number of schools hurt by failed metrics, but it’s a short term fix to a deep problem.

Florida’s “A” to “F” school grading system lost all credibility this week. It’s time for the state to stop wasting our money tweaking a disaster and start showing some empathy for the real human beings who are the heart and soul of our schools.

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